In the Shadow of the Western Hills
In the Shadow of the Western Hills is the second track from the Steal Smoked Fish single. Lyrics Spread out the old maps on the floor Plot the course of the infection Trace from its beginnings to the present Is there no one here who's making this connection Feral cats out by the trash cans To the true believer everything's a sign Scrape the pigments from the baseboards In the shadow of the western hills And paint my vision on my body In the shadow of the western hills Bleak rose-petaled sky in two dimensions Black treeline a blade that cuts across it all Can't seem to sleep or find my appetite Since I got home from the hospital Call up Rebecca, maybe try to explain But she hangs up while I'm still talking, I walk out into the rain Wander from the alley to the darkness Sink down completely, leave no trace Trapped beneath the surface of the ice again Lie still with the moonlight on my face Wait for the wolves to keep their promise Listen for their footfalls on the snow I can't hear things clearly to be honest In the shadow of the western hills He gets most healed that waits the longest In the shadow of the western hills Comments by John Darnielle About this Song *"This was gonna be on the next record. I was really happy with a lot of the imagery in it but I couldn't get a satisfying bridge until about four days ago, so...so that's just how it goes." -- 2012-03-24 - Merkin Concert Hall - New York, NY *"It's a simple song about trying to hold it together because you feel certain that if you can't hold it together, something terrible will happen and you have it on very good authority, namely the voice within you, that that is true." -- 2012-06-28 - Swedish American Hall - San Francisco, CA *"This next album is about mental illness. I worked in mental health here in southern California for a very long time but I've come to sort of think the way we sort of describe mental illness as unuseful to the people, to the population that we purport to serve, when we nurse or administer, because to put a person's, individual's daily experiences in a basket and to call it mental illness is to really minimize and uh, compartmentalize them in a way that isn't helpful to anybody, I mean it's hard not to do because it's a big world and there's lots of people, so being able to describe things in generalization seems really useful in the short term, but in the long term I think we wind up doing is dehumanizing a bunch of people who need more human services than we're kind of willing or able to provide in our emotionally bankrupt culture. So anyways, the next record is about the people who tend to fall off the map who you know, who you knew in high school, and one day they start acting a little different and you sort of wondered if they got into something weird, but what they had, it was sort of a time bomb somewhere in their genes, and it started to tick, and you would see them somewhere at a party maybe talking too close for too long, and you wonder what happened to the person you used to know. After you graduate, you don't hear of him, or her, again for a while." -- 2012-07-03 - Folk Music Center - Claremont, CA Things Referenced in this Song Live Shows this Song Was Played at *2012-03-24 - Merkin Concert Hall - New York, NY *2012-04-02 - The Barbican - London, England *2012-06-22 - Rio Theater - Vancouver, British Columbia *2012-06-23 - Columbia City Theater - Seattle, WA *2012-06-25 - Mission Theater - Portland, OR *2012-06-28 - Swedish American Hall - San Francisco, CA *2012-06-30 - McCabe's Guitar Shop - Santa Monica, CA *2012-07-03 - Folk Music Center - Claremont, CA *2012-10-11 - Theater of Living Arts - Philadelphia, PA Category:Steal Smoked Fish songs